Georgi Donevski has fought the memory of being forcibly marched out of Greece for longer than he cares to remember.

He was wrenched from his parents, taken from his village in the dark and forced to trek across the mountains. It was March 30 1948, the height of Greece's brutal civil war, and he was a boy of 12.

But this summer something extraordinary happened: after 55 years of enforced exile, of being stripped of his Greek citizenship and property, Mr Donevski, now a Macedonian, was finally allowed to return to the place of his birth.

Like other child refugees taking advantage of a decree that temporarily allows them into Greece until the end of this month, he was reunited with relatives and friends. He even got to see his beloved home village, but the trip was not easy.

No one has paid more for the sins of their fathers than the children of Greece's Slavonic-speaking Macedonians, who fought with the communists during the 1946-49 war. More than half a century later, the struggle that pitted leftists against the western-backed government forces has not been forgotten. The Macedonian minority's "treacherous" desire to carve out an autonomous state during the war raises suspicion even now.

In a country taught to believe in its own ethnic purity, the non-ethnic Greeks still raise uncomfortable questions about Hellenic identity. The suspicion was all too evident when Mr Donevski handed in his Macedonian passport at the Niki frontier post. "What's your name?" the border guard barked.

"My name is Georgi," said Mr Donevski, who runs the Skopje-based world organisation of refugee children from Greece.

"No, your Greek name!"

"I think it's Giorgos Antoniou, but I have not used it since I left your country in 1948."

"And your birthplace?"

"Baptchor," he beamed, using the Slav name for his ancestral home.

"There is no Baptchor" the guard said. "There never was a Baptchor. There is only the Greek village Pimenikon. I will give you a visa to visit Pimenikon."

And with that, Mr Donevski came home. He wept as he stood under the border control's cavernous tin roof. No moment, he said, had ever been sweeter.

"This is history. I can't believe it. Greece, my birthplace Greece, the land of my ancestors. I've longed for this moment, I've dreamed about it for 55 entire years."

Since August around 600 Macedonian exiles, now elderly and scattered across the former communist bloc, Australia and Canada, have embarked on the same odyssey. Most had feared they would not live long enough to tell the tale.

"They are the civil war's innocent victims," said Greece's deputy foreign minister, Andreas Loverdos. "This is a humanitarian measure, a first step towards righting the wrongs of the past."

Athens' reformist government hopes the concession will not only help bury the legacy of ill-feeling from the civil war, but go some way towards making Greece a more diverse, democratic society. Under the decree, the political refugees, who also include Macedonian civil war guerrillas, can visit Greece "for a period of 20 days".

Human rights advocates hope the temporary lifting of the ban will lead to the eventual repatriation of the exiles. For Mr Donevski, who has campaigned for the right of return, it is not a moment too soon. He had never forgotten the Greek mountain village of Baptchor.

"I've written to Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, the Greek, Macedonian and British parliaments insisting there is no law in the world that says children are to blame for what their parents do," he said. "We weren't fighters, we were taken across the border by partisans.

"I was 12, the youngest of five children, and I didn't want to go. But the government forces were advancing and bombing all the [Slav] Macedonian villages so the partisans decided to put us in groups with 'mothers' at the helm. Some were just toddlers. We walked and walked through the night until we saw these little bright lights ... They were the cigarette tips of the Yugoslav guards beckoning us across the border."

It would be three decades before Mr Donevski's immediate family was reunited. Like all those who sought sanctuary behind the iron curtain, the Donevski children were raised in state orphanages. "What happened to us was common. I was sent to Croatia, my two brothers went to Uzbekistan, my sisters ended up in Romania and my parents in Poland."

When they were eventually reunited in 1978 they did not recognise each other.

Forced assimilation

The refusal of Greece to accept the existence of any minority other than a Muslim population in Thrace brought immense difficulties for ethnic Macedonians. From 1913, when their lands were snatched from the Ottoman empire and incorporated into the modern Greek state, they have known only hardship. Macedonian names of towns, villages and rivers were changed as Athens pursued a policy of forced assimilation.

In 2000 several leading members of the Macedonian minority were put on trial for the public use of their mother tongue.

"All our problems started when the Greeks came," said Maria Buntevska, 72, a former partisan who has lived in Bitola, southern Macedonia, since fleeing Greece.

"They wouldn't even let me speak to my mother in Macedonian because it was a 'dirty language'," she said. "I have vivid memories of my grandmother being made to learn Greek at night school when she was in her late 80s."

Suspicion towards the ethnic Macedonians worsened during the 1990s when Athens and Skopje wrangled over the right of the former Yugoslav republic to call itself Macedonia. Greeks believed that their Yugoslav neighbours harboured territorial ambitions on their own adjacent province of Macedonia, not least Salonika, its port. Soon, the Slav speakers came to be regarded as paid agents of "Skopjan propaganda".

"Greek identity is constructed on the myth that every Greek speaks Greek and is Orthodox Christian by religion," says Panayote Dimitras, spokesman for the Greek branch of the human rights group Helsinki Monitor. "These people shatter that. By modern European and international human rights standards the way Greece treats them is condemnable."

What riles the exiles most is that ethnic Greeks who became political refugees were repatriated under a 1982 amnesty.

For many the concession is too little, too late. At least 150 ethnic Macedonians have been barred from entering Greece for failing to replace the Macedonian names of birthplaces in their passports with Greek variants. Their travel documents now bear the stamp of a black cross under the word "undesirable".

Up in the pine forests of Baptchor, however, Mr Donevski has only praise for a measure that he says has changed his life. "Everything about Baptchor, even its name, is no more," he laments. "But this," he laughs, cupping his hands in the village's icy river, "is exactly as it used to be. I know I have come home."

How fighting broke out

· The civil war was fought between the government and communists from the EAM-ELAS (National Liberation Front-National Popular Liberation Army) after the Nazi occupation ended in 1944

· It began in December 1944 when a coalition between the royalists and the communists - the principal Greek resistance movement during the second world war - broke down over the communists' refusal to disarm. British military forces defeated the EAM-ELAS within weeks but only after they had overrun nearly all of the country

· A new government was formed and the Greek king restored to the throne. The communists conceded but continuing tensions led to the dissolution of the government. A full-fledged civil war broke out in 1946. First Britain and later the US gave the Greek government substantial military and economic aid

· Northern Greece was at the centre of the conflict. In 1947-48 the communists captured large swaths of territory but the Greek National Army, reorganised and backed by the US, slowly began to regain control

· In August 1949 a final offensive by the national army under Marshal Alexander Papagos was launched and the insurgents surrendered or fled across the northern border to Greece's communist neighbours

· Around 100,000 people were killed in the civil war and there was massive economic disruption. At least 25,000 Greeks were either voluntarily or forcibly evacuated to eastern bloc countries, while around 700,000 were displaced during the fighting